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LE

"The Ministry of Defence's plan to explore letting a company manage military-equipment procurement has been approved by the UK Treasury, Bloomberg reported, citing a person familiar with the matter.

HM Treasury was unavailable to comment on the matter.

Bloomberg said Defence Secretary Philip Hammond would on Thursday outline the final stage of plans to make the Defence Equipment and Support agency into a government-owned and contractor-operated body, known as a "go-co". (link.reuters.com/xah67t)

As in many other European countries, Britain's defence ministry has been faced with procurement-cost overruns in response to budget pressures, and has been casting about for possible savings.

Bloomberg said potential bidders to fill the role include U.S. contractors Jacobs Engineering Group Inc, Bechtel Group Inc, Fluor Corp, CH2M Hill Inc and KBR Inc, while British company Serco Group Plc may also be interested."

Good idea in principle, perhaps, but there's some dodgy corporate reputations in the list of potential bidders .

LE

"The Ministry of Defence's plan to explore letting a company manage military-equipment procurement has been approved by the UK Treasury, Bloomberg reported, citing a person familiar with the matter.

HM Treasury was unavailable to comment on the matter.

Bloomberg said Defence Secretary Philip Hammond would on Thursday outline the final stage of plans to make the Defence Equipment and Support agency into a government-owned and contractor-operated body, known as a "go-co". (link.reuters.com/xah67t)

As in many other European countries, Britain's defence ministry has been faced with procurement-cost overruns in response to budget pressures, and has been casting about for possible savings.

Bloomberg said potential bidders to fill the role include U.S. contractors Jacobs Engineering Group Inc, Bechtel Group Inc, Fluor Corp, CH2M Hill Inc and KBR Inc, while British company Serco Group Plc may also be interested."

Good idea in principle, perhaps, but there's some dodgy corporate reputations in the list of potential bidders .

LE

Main problem with this is if we (the military) don't know what we want in the first place how's outsourcing it from the MoD going to help. Additionally there's not many companies that make what we need.

Hang on I can see it now; cheap as chips but of no use to man nor beast (admittedly not a great deal of change there then)

LE

Main problem with this is if we (the military) don't know what we want in the first place how's outsourcing it from the MoD going to help. Additionally there's not many companies that make what we need.

Hang on I can see it now; cheap as chips but of no use to man nor beast (admittedly not a great deal of change there then)

The stopped clock of The Belfast Telegraph seems to indicate the
time
Of the explosion - or was that last week's? Difficult to keep
track:
Everything's a bit askew, like the twisted pickets of the
security gate, the wreaths,
That approximate the spot where I'm told the night patrol
went through.

LE

Let's be honest, can the cost and time over runs get any worse on any project in the past, ever?
What has ever come in on time, on budget, and does what it says on the tin?
Probably fcuk all since the days of Bomber Harris and there was no Mod meddling involved then or they probably (by a committee) would have chosen Zeppelins instead ..........................................................
And a couple of years later, all the committee retired and gone on to work for .........................................................
Zeppelin GMBh

LE

Let's be honest, can the cost and time over runs get any worse on any project in the past, ever?
What has ever come in on time, on budget, and does what it says on the tin?
Probably fcuk all since the days of Bomber Harris and there was no Mod meddling involved then or they probably (by a committee) would have chosen Zeppelins instead ..........................................................
And a couple of years later, all the committee retired and gone on to work for .........................................................
Zeppelin GMBh

The vast majority of them, according to the stats I've been presented with (and no I can't lay my hands on them right now - believe me, I'd love to).

The shit ones that fail are usually the biggest and most expensive in the first place, and they get screwed up because more and more people just have to be involved with them. This is particularly true when you get all the way to the top and see procurement decisions made (or at least heavily influenced) by politicians with zero regard to sound procurement principles.

Unfortunately it doesn't matter that you can count your big failing projects on one hand, because when they account for half your organisational budget it drags everyone else into the mire regardless.

For the most part, DE&S performs well - often in spite of piss-poor (or non-existant) guidance from the people supposedly setting the specifications and the policies.

However I'm an Abbey Wood-dwelling DE&S PM so this post clearly has no relevance.

BrunoNoMedals: Watery-eyed dealer of paperwork.

swordman said:

The Company never came out of action until they reached Bremen. The only time we lost contact with the enemy was when they ran faster that we could catch them.

If the definition of a successful project is limited to achievement of delivery in terms of time, cost and quality, then you are probably right. Not least because much of the cost of delivery (as opposed to the product itself) is sunk in the general morass of defence spending. Moreover, success is often measured against final budgets in terms of time, cost and quality, not baselined back to project startup.

Could programs and projects be done faster, better cheaper though? In my experience as a service customer, Requirements Manager and subsequently industry bidder, the procurement process could be much slicker especially if junior project managers are empowered.

Davetheclown

Guest

Staff officers not fully understanding what the end user requires, we had a problem with a RAF Staff Officer ordering the wrong brand of equipment, when challenged he knew nothing of the technical nature of the kit and thought the one he ordered was shinier and more whizbang. SME not being asked for recommendations, or the staff officer has

a) been a complete muppet and sent to Abbey Wood where he can do no harm

b) Staff Officer sent to Abbey Wood as a holding pattern for more senior post

c) Staff Officer thinks he can make a difference

d) Staff Officer sent because he hits the right quals for the job but is operationally out of date with current practice

e) Staff Officer wants an MBE and does not give a **** about the end user

f) Staff Officer that loves being schmoozed and boozed, and feeling important stringing a prospective company Bilko Style.

g) Genuinely nice bloke that last a job at a brewery that failed in office party management, says the wrong things.

There we in a nutshell what procurement is all about, then it goes downhill when civil service muppets step in.

LE

Perhaps it's a cry for help, that the MOD know because it is 'in house' it is very easily influenced and by putting a corporate wall in the way it may somehow help?

I think it's completely wrong, can you imagine the likes of bae dealing with CH2M and in my experience, these companies are no more capable.

The problems I see with defence procurement isn't the procurement, it's the involvement of the end user and politicians. If they think somehow the end customer is now going to hand CH2 a specification on 1998 and then get a new APC in 2010 with no input as to including technological enhancements from DERA during production or another budget challenge from the paymaster they are mad, and then mod will be paying Ch2 extra and then the contractor extra for design changes.

I think it's a bad idea, they need to keep it in house and perhaps with support from industry and using a consultant (I offer my services) review the reasons, blood guts and all as to why defence procurement appear to be shouldering the blame for something I would imagine is out of there control.

The only thing I can imagine is my first point, do Defence Procurement teams have to salute their managers? I can tell you CH2 will still kiss the Sqd Ldr ass if he asks for a biday in the back of the P8 UK version.

LE

Staff officers not fully understanding what the end user requires, we had a problem with a RAF Staff Officer ordering the wrong brand of equipment, when challenged he knew nothing of the technical nature of the kit and thought the one he ordered was shinier and more whizbang. SME not being asked for recommendations, or the staff officer has

All of those are about requirement setting and project definition. Very few staff officers are involved in a project beyond the requirement setting stage during the project execution phase. There are next-to-none with any influence on the commercial side of procurement. The role of the staff officer and (warrant officer) is very limited.

It is too easy to blame the civil servants and call them muppets. There are some very good project managers at Abbey Wood, who would make excellent PMs in industry if only they had the ball to jump from the cushy public sector environment. There is also, of course, some complete dross there, who would never have been hired by industry and certainly wouldn't last in it.

Like most public sector organisations, there are layers of committees, reviews, compliance checks and the like with very few actually taking any executive decisions. I never met a procurement civil servant who had any idea of the cost of actually managing his project(s).

LE

Plenty of oil and mining projects end up years late and massively over budget. Plenty of big IT projects for major businesses flush huge sums of money down the drain with nothing to show for it. There's nothing unique about the MoD's problems in this area.

Where projects tend to go wrong is:

A) No clear requirements from the user.
B) The requirements get changed half way through the project.
C) The project gets delayed from the original schedule due to someone suddenly not wanting to spend money during the current fiscal year (generally because something else went wrong and the money got spent elsewhere).
D) Somebody has a bright idea to "save money" by reusing existing assets, but it ends up costing more money to glue two unrelated things together than it would have to just replace them.

The above applies just as much to private industry as it does to the military. Privatising procurement without addressing the above won't fix anything.

Successful projects tend to require both sides to work together to a common goal. If you ever get to a point where you have to start waving the terms of the contract in someone's face, the project has already gone very seriously wrong and may be beyond recovery. Adding a third party to the mix is unlikely to help matters, especially if that third party is mainly interested in going through the motions while putting in the minimum effort possible (which is how outsourcers make their profit) without taking any real responsibility for the final result (which they rarely do).

Current thinking in private industry seems to be moving in the direction of splitting big projects up into smaller stand alone ones when possible, evaluating the risks and successes at each stage, and cutting those parts of the project that don't show signs of promise. Some big things can't be split up though, and nobody really has an answer to how improve the success rate with those.

LE

Plenty of oil and mining projects end up years late and massively over budget. Plenty of big IT projects for major businesses flush huge sums of money down the drain with nothing to show for it. There's nothing unique about the MoD's problems in this area.

Current thinking in private industry seems to be moving in the direction of splitting big projects up into smaller stand alone ones when possible, evaluating the risks and successes at each stage, and cutting those parts of the project that don't show signs of promise. Some big things can't be split up though, and nobody really has an answer to how improve the success rate with those.

You are right about MoD not being unique in having problems with projects; very few organisations get projects absolutely right and many really plough them. You have picked a few reasons why projects fail, but there are far more and, unreality, there are usually many contributing factors to an unsuccessful project.

Most businesses (including those in the public sector) procure projects infrequently, because they are working in the operational environment. They are structured for routine operations, not discrete projects. But some businesses are highly "projectized" (using PMI definitions) and are structured only to deliver projects. Abbey Wood exists only to deliver projects, as does the bit in the centre, whatever it is now call, that "owns" requirements. They should be getting project right most of the time!

In my experience, the likes of Fluor and KBR are far more effective at delivering complex projects than Abbey Wood. Some have long-standing partnering relationships with clients to deliver projects and programs of the kind that MoD is seeking. I am not sure how MoD will establish the kind of open book strategic partnering relationship which it seeks, partly because of culture but more because of Treasury and European Union rules for public procurement.

Whoever wins the contract will, of course, also inherit the majority of civilian staff at Abbey Wood under TUPE and will be faced with a massive change management problem to get ex civil servants to work efficiently. They will need to find a very strong partner company to make this work. I fear one of the many companies that have grown fat on public sector contracts getting it.

LE

LE

Requirements setting is key. From experience, I have seen equipment delivered where the first SME interaction was at the factory acceptance test. By then it was too late. As costly as it may be a proportion of actual end users need to be involved in setting the requirements, not their OC's or OpsOs as happened in this case. The requirements process needs to be fluid enough to accept major changes if justified, that way we avoid getting another row of Vehicles parked up because they are under armoured and can't go outside of the wire.

LE

The in consulting far and wide with the user community is that you end up with a Chinese parliament and end up with the wrong compromise requirement document. To complement good requirements setting you need good feedback and stakeholder management. There is no point consulting users at the requirements stage if you don't then feed back decisions to the user.

All too often as a Service Customer representative, I would hit a brick wall in units when asking for input into a requirement, because they were too busy.